Daniel Half Human

JUNE 1945There was no more street, just a path through massive piles of rubble. My jeep couldn't get through. I put it in reverse, backtracked, and turned off to the right.But where I'd expected to find the Grosse Bergstrasse, there was just another rubble field. To the left, down near the Elbe, there were blocks of walled-up, badly bombed houses. I stopped and got out. The jeep wouldn't block traffic, because there wasn't any.I knew this city inside out, every inch of it by heart, but there was no more city -- only ruins and a sea of bricks in all directions. Of the trees that had stood here, only blackened trunks remained. Some sprouted a few thin green twigs.But there was life amidst the rubble. A woman wearing a man's torn jacket, a spotted apron over her belly, stood hanging up wash. She turned around, looked me over. Her face was pale. I wondered,Do I know her?She picked up the laundry basket and went into her shack.The air was mild, soft against my skin.Climbing back into the jeep, I asked myself, not for the first time, why had I landed here, in Hamburg, of all places? Shortly after Germany capitulated, I'd been transferred from my U.S. Army unit to the Royal British Army. They needed interpreters for special interrogations. But why didn't I ask to be stationed someplace else, say, on the Luneburg Heath or in the Ruhr, anywhere at all, just, please, not Hamburg? And why, of all places, was I now heading toward the district of Altona? I had no job-related business there.If this was once the Konigstrasse, then in a few hundred meters I could turn left onto the Hoheschulstrasse...where the Christianeum was...where Dr. Knoppe used to torment us with Latin verbs and make us translate endless passages from Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars....I suddenly remembered a delicious taste, a special fragrance....My mouth began to water. And I almost heard the noise of cars rushing by on what had been a well-paved street....These sharp memories took me back twelve years, to recess...sneaking out of the schoolyard, me and Armin Hillmann...dashing across the intersection to the bakery on the Muhlenstrasse for our favorite midmorning snack -- sweet, crumblyFranzbrotchen,a Hamburg specialty.Now there was no more Hoheschulstrasse, no more Muhlenstrasse, and nothing left of that bakery, either. Just another path through rubble.I followed it past makeshift barracks with tin roofs, past here and there a wooden cross and wilted flowers marking a grave. Now the air was thick and heavy. After I'd walked a few meters, my tongue felt coated with dust.What was I looking for? I knew I wouldn't find the house.I could have driven on, to the Flottbeker Chaussee. That's where my family had lived.It wasn't a clear thought, but deep inside myself I knew that whatever I was looking for, I didn't really want to find. Among the few houses left halfway standing was one I recognized. In its basement was a bar called the Family Corner. Armin's father had sat here sometimes -- once a week to be exact, on Tuesdays, when the dive where he hung out the rest of the time was closed.No more door with glass panels. All there was were wooden planks nailed shut. I stepped around some rubble to a side door and walked in.Obviously, the Family Corner had not done any business for some time. But thanks to residues of beer, schnapps, sweat, and cigarettes lodged in the furniture and woodwork, the place still smelled like a dive.Out of the corner of my eye I saw a slightly yellowed sign on the wall beside the coatrack: JEWS NOT INVITED.In front of the bar crouched a heavyset man around fifty, hammering a bedframe together.I didn't know him. Maybe the place had changed owners."Closed," he said in English. "No beer.""Do you know what happened to the tenants in number seventeen?" I asked.The man lChotjewitz, David is the author of 'Daniel Half Human ', published 2004 under ISBN 9780689857478 and ISBN 0689857470.